Definition
Oconcursus is a civil law term with two related senses, both rooted in the idea of things coming together or meeting in legal significance:
1. A collision or conflict — most commonly appearing as concursus creditorum, meaning a conflict or competition among creditors, typically arising when multiple creditors assert claims against the same debtor or the same pool of assets simultaneously.
2. A concurrence or meeting — as in concursus actionum, the concurrence of actions, meaning the situation in which multiple legal claims or causes of action arise from the same set of facts and are available to the same party at the same time.
The term derives from Roman civil law and passed into the civilian legal tradition, appearing in jurisdictions with civil law heritage — particularly Louisiana in the American context — as both a procedural and substantive concept.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term in historical sources should be alert to two distinct problems. First, the spelling variant: the form "oconcursus" appears to reflect a typographical or manuscript artifact; the operative term in legal usage is concursus, or in its full Latin compounds, concursus creditorum and concursus actionum. Searching historical materials under the "o-" prefixed form will produce limited results; the substantive legal doctrine lives under concursus and its compounds.
Second, researchers working in Louisiana law will find concursus as a living procedural mechanism — Louisiana Code of Civil Procedure Articles 4651–4662 establish concursus proceedings as the Louisiana analogue to federal interpleader, allowing a party who owes an obligation to multiple claimants to require all claimants to assert their rights in a single proceeding. This is a direct civilian inheritance, and the historical civil law meaning of concursus creditorum (creditors competing over a debtor's assets) maps closely onto this procedural form. Researchers conflating the Louisiana concursus proceeding with the common law interpleader action should be cautious: the two share a functional purpose but differ in procedural mechanics, historical pedigree, and judicial treatment.
For corpus researchers working in pre-20th-century American legal materials, concursus language will appear most densely in Louisiana decisions, civilian treatises, and admiralty contexts. In common law jurisdictions, the underlying concepts are addressed through interpleader, marshaling of assets, and creditor priority rules — none of which carry the concursus label.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the foundational entry, defining concursus in its two senses — collision/conflict and concurrence/meeting — with the illustrative compounds concursus creditorum and concursus actionum. The entry is brief and taxonomic, reflecting Black's treatment of Latin civil law terms as reference points rather than developed doctrines.
What Black's does not address is the procedural evolution of concursus into a distinct legal proceeding in civilian jurisdictions. The 2nd edition entry treats the term as a definitional matter rather than a procedural one, which is appropriate to its era but leaves a gap for researchers tracing the doctrine into modern Louisiana or comparative civil law contexts. Later editions of Black's expand somewhat on interpleader and related joinder concepts, but the civilian heritage of concursus as a proceeding type is better traced through Louisiana-specific sources and civilian treatises than through Black's alone.
Jurisdictional Note
The term has its most direct modern legal application in Louisiana, where concursus is a codified procedural device distinct from common law interpleader. In other American jurisdictions and in federal practice, the functional equivalent is interpleader under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 22 or the federal interpleader statute. Researchers should not assume doctrinal equivalence across these forms.